Monthly Archives: December 2009

Post navigation

Once upon a time, red-eyed frogs were mainly found in stories like “Alice in Wonderland” or in the aftermath of a Grateful Dead concert. Now, thanks to global warming, they are part of everyone’s reality, and if we don’t stop, then we’re going to mutate to the point where we one day have Cyclops people roaming around, too.

That it has gotten to this shows just what corporate greed can do. When I was in high school, we knew how much damage dumping factory waste into our air and waterways could do, so my friends and I went to protests and did other high school-like things like airing our views in order to listen to ourselves talk, but those belching smokestacks continued no matter what we did.

And now here we are years later in the land of the mutant frogs. Skeptics say that climate change occurs every 3,000 years, and that this is it, but that is only a small part. The other parts are corporations and cultures that put money first and health fifth. The incidents of cancer are up, more people are dying in floods and drought and more children are being diagnosed with autism because we are polluting ourselves to death. Scientists say that even if we stop now it will still take the earth 100 years to heal. We should take their advice anyway before we go the way of the Babylonians.

A pine tree probably fell on Senator Maria Caldwell’s head. Otherwise, she would have had the sense to stay out of the Amanda Knox trial. The Democratic senator from Washington State is urging Secretary of State Clinton to intervene to make sure that “Foxy Knoxy gets a fair trial. (Read get a free “Get out of Jail” card.)

I believe she nurdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Peruga, Italy when the two students were sharing a house together, and if she didn’t, then she had something to do with it and should be imprisoned for being an accomplice.

First, she changed her story several times. She first said she was in the house covering her ears to muffle out her roommate’s screams. If that was the case, then why didn’t she call the police or at the very least try and see what was wrong? After Meredith Kercher’s death, Knox said that she was “saddened” by her friend’s death. A real friend would have seen what was going on and would have at least offered some support.

Then, she said that she was at her boyfriend’s, Rafael Solecito’s, house hoofing it up, getting high, watching a movie on his computer and getting boinked. Yet, the forensic evidence showed that they had not watched a movie on his computer when they said they had, adding yet another lie to the timbers.

Her DNA was also found on the murder weapon, and palm and fingerprints matching hers were found on Meredith Kercher’s face and neck.

Some kids are just bad seeds, but to raise a full-fledged sociopath takes the same amount of consistency that raising a philanthropist does. They both come from consistent parenting. In Amanda Knox’s case, her parents probably let her do whatever she wanted, thought that everything she did was cute and never set any appropriate limits on anything. The fact that he accepted her drug use and Lolita-like behavior says a lot about how he viewed his role as a parent.

Some say that Knox didn’t receive a fair trial and that she was the victim of her own innocence, which caused her to act celebratory when she should have been shocked and coquettish when she should have been centered and serious. Pictures taken just hours after the murder show her kissing her boyfriend, and she also bought sexy lingerie, which would hardly be normal for one whose friend was just murdered and whose house was robbed. This tipped off the Italian authorities, as it well should have.

They say that Amanda Fox was convicted in the court of public opinion, but in the end, she only convicted herself.

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been posting a lot recently. I’ve been finishing up a book that I’m publishing independently through Wheatmark, Inc.

The subject of the book: me!! Or, more accurately, my Pakistani-American journey, and what it tells me about how differing cultures and religions interact in these crazy times.

It will be available come January on Amazon. Here’s something from the foreword by Warren Bennis, the famed leadership guru who’s advised four U.S. presidents and a good chunk of America’s corporate world:

“The victories that Asghar discusses here, involving acceptance and reconciliation among people who can feel deserted and betrayed by their closest kindred, are victories, I think, for our larger family of human societies as they grind up against one another each day in an era characterized by identity politics and partisan posturing.”

Oh well. Barack Obama may still end up being a great president, but he’s struggling a bit. Earl is right that Afghanistan is the war he always wanted, and there should be no surprise there.

But the disappointment, for me, comes from two sources.

One involves how Obama is positively Bushy in his obliviousness about the roots of conflict — and especially of the Hydra effect when fighting terrorists in a way that inflames people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who can’t keep track of whether the enemy comes from within or from the West.

The other one involves how he doesn’t keep track of price tags. I can’t buy certain things I once planned to buy, because of fiscal realities. Washington rarely understands this when planning wars or domestic programs, whether a conservative Republican like Reagan or a liberal Democrat like Obama is in charge. Oh, for the balanced-budget days of Clinton…

I teach a couple of courses at the university on the media. My students want to learn about the news and what makes something newsworthy. So when they came into the classroom and saw that the lead item of my agenda was the Tiger Woods saga, some revolted, and they all acted as if the topic revolted them.

I explained that it is indeed news and an example of Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good money. Or in this case: Junk news drives out serious news. This is a story line that offers everything that makes news. It is simple and human. We may not understand cap and trade or derivatives, but we do know sex, celebrity and cheating. We feel smart because we all knew that no one ever crashed a car backing out of a driveway at 2:30 AM and no one was ever rescued by the wife, who just happened to be carrying a golf club, breaking in the rear window.

Then there is the Schadenfreude (or in Yiddish, reverse nachiss) the pleasure people get in the bad fortune of others. Here are the elements of Greek Tragedy as explicated by Aristotle. A man of high degree, a hero (deserved or not), is brought low by flaws intrinsic to his own character. The hero needs to be otherwise unblemished. This is a classic storyline because Tiger had not previously been scarred by scandal.

While I planned on devoting only 15 minutes of our hour and a half class to this lightweight trash, my students carried on enthusiastically for 40 minutes! That’s why it’s news. It draws eyes, attention and feeling of superiority–as well as the car wreck response of: Phew. Glad it wasn’t me.

Barack Obama is the left wing’s version of Ronald Regan. He is going to be this generation’s Teflon President. His ratings may be down, but he will probably ride it out and drive off into a sunset in glory. Even so, there are many things he has not followed through while driving into the White House under the moniker of change, change and of course, change. The economy is down, we still do not have a viable healthcare plan that won’t also kill our dead horse of an economy, and then there are those ACORN blunders.

But he is right in sending 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. If it’s for people’s safety and happiness, then it’s a good thing. If it helps create a world where we can ride on buses, subways and trains without thinking about meeting our maker, then that’s a good thing. If it means that one more mother, father, sister or brother gets to go to a mall or be with their family and friends, then that’s a good thing, too. It’s just too bad that people have to send their children in to straighten out the mess.

Some have compared Afghanistan to Vietnam, but even on their worst days, the Viet Cong never blew things up around the globe. Some, like Michael Moore, who leans so far to the left he is lying down, feels that we should quit meddling in others’ affairs, but sometimes it’s just the thing to do.

Earl, kiddo, you have to remember that Tiger Woods is only part black. The other parts are Asian, white and Native American, so maybe the media is aiming at those parts instead. Besides, everyone knows that if it’s salacious then the media will go out after it. Let’s take a look at some recent breaking events from TMZ and other sources:

Oprah is throwing in the towel, the Kardashian sisters are vying for a spot on that show before Oprah rings down the curtain, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gylenhaal are calling it quits and let’s not forget Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who are about as Caucasian looking as they come. So when they media jumps all over a story, they jump all over it brown, white or in between.

Many online outlets posts stories like these first due to Fast Food journalism, which states that the easier the story is to digest, the longer it will remain on the virtual menu. On the other end we have the Filet Mignon journalism where the focus is on beefier stories like the war in Afghanistan, the 1,000 plus page health care bill or a presidential speech, which usually gets bumped to the back of the net to make room for the next debacle. And it’s all because Fast Food journalism that requires that is easier to swallow and digest and makes the rest of us look relatively normal.

The war in Afghanistan is no longer the Bush legacy; it is now Obama’s.Ironically, he made it his own by delivering a speech that, save for one paragraph about having too long ignored and under-resourced Afghanistan, could have been delivered by George W.

With neither a fireside chat’s intimacy nor the stirring rhetoric of JFK (We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.) he tried to sell America on a war that after 8 years we are tired of. He tried to reignite the passion and unity we felt following 9-11, but the visuals contradicted the intent. The subliminal message from the serious faces of West Point cadets, who will soon be in harm’s way, was not hostile but neither was it enthusiastic about either the president or the mission.

Filled with stay the course allusions and substituting Bush’s conflation of Al Qaeda and Saddam with his own conflation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, it was filled with vague hopes, false promises and half-truths. He claimed that we are not alone but have 43 allied nations with us. If you understand “with us” as not condemning us, then I guess it may be true. If, on the other hand, you infer–as he implies–that we have 43 active allies rendering meaningful assistance, then it is a lie. He claims that we have to put in more military in order to withdraw our military. This is the 21st century version of burning the village in order to save it. He claims that his generals have a plan and that Gen. Petreaus has found the core truth of anti-insurgency. Okay. But that core truth depends on fighting for a viable and legitimate entity, a real government. Karsai and his corrupt drugeaucracy have no real legitimacy. His election was as fixed as Ahmadinejad’s.

Obama asserted that setting an 18-month window to bring the war to a successful conclusion and begin withdrawing would concentrate the minds and will of the Karsai government to get their act together and help get 200,000 troops trained and 40,000 police in service. These are not realistic goals but opium-induced pipedreams.

While Republicans make much about the 18-month goal as being dispiriting to those who might be willing to cast their lot with us, truthfully, it doesn’t make much difference. No sensible Afghan believes that we are there for the long run. They know we will go away and those who cooperated with us will be punished–even killed.

They have a saying there: “You have the clocks but we have the time.” Yes, the Taliban will go underground and lay low for 18 months, then come back as we begin to go. In 18 months we will have to re-evaluate and if things are going worse, we can’t leave. On the other hand, if things are going better, we can’t leave. Yet, we will leave eventually, leaving our allies in a lurch. The Taliban know this–as do the others.

This is not political, not the property of any one American party. It is historical. We encouraged the East Germans to revolt in the 1950s, and then let them be crushed. We did the same with the Hungarians. Then in the Czech Springtime of Freedom, we implied help to Dubcek and stood by again as the Soviet tanks rolled in. We promised aid to our Shiite friends in Iraq during the First Gulf War and left them to Saddam’s not so tender mercies. We promised the Sunni Sons of Iraq protection against the Shiites recently and have effectively abandoned them too. We have a long record of abandoning our allies and appropriately have little credibility to show for it. Can anyone forget the frantic crush on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon as our onetime friends were left behind?

Obama outlined three choices and tried to sell the one that didn’t seem to be self-evidently catastrophic. As usual, he tried a middle way between pulling out and making an unlimited commitment.

There is a fourth way: Cut our troop levels to 20,000 and keep the base at Bagram. Use it as a kind of aircraft carrier to launch against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and prevent the re-infestation of Afghanistan with Al Qaeda training bases.

As reprehensible as the Taliban are, there are many reprehensible regimes that are intolerant hateful, oppressive and misogynistic. They are not all our enemies. Al Qaeda is.

In 18 months, Afghanistan will not have a civil society with less corruption or a large well-trained army or police. We will have more dead and mutilated Americans and 30 billion fewer dollars to spend on nation building in our own homeland.

Mr. President. If you are going to be either a great president or a one-term president or perhaps both, risk it all for something worthwhile, something that can serve our interests. Err on the side of truth-telling. This speech, and worse this policy-by-committee, offers neither victory nor peace.

Only the most hopelessly nave, star struck or a true believer could have ever thought that President Obama would not dump massive numbers of fresh troops into Afghanistan the first chance he got. He said or strongly inferred that escalation of the Afghan war was in his cards on two occasions as a presidential candidate, and once before he became a presidential candidate. He strongly inferred he’d fight in Afghanistan in his anti-Iraq war, Bush bashing speech at Chicago’s Federal Plaza on October 2, 2002. The speech drew widespread attention, burnished his credentials as a war opponent and established him as a political comer on the national scene.

Sporting a peace button on his right suit jacket lapel, Obama went on the attack. He blasted the senseless killing, Iraq government corruption, called it a drain on American resources, and a foreign policy nightmare. He repeatedly called it a dumb war. The “dumb war” characterization implied that there were wars that were worth waging. Earlier in the speech, he made it clear that he was not a reflexive opponent of all wars. The US was simply fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place. He demanded that Bush fight an all out, no holds barred war against terrorism. Though he did not mention Afghanistan directly, in the speech it didn’t take much to connect the terrorism to Afghanistan dots.

Six months after he announced his presidential candidacy Obama was still among the pack of Democratic presidential candidates. But in a speech in August 2007 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars he left no doubt that Afghanistan would be his number one target for attack if he was elected.

He made an impassioned promise to wage what he dubbed the war that had to be won. He spelled out in minute detail his plan of attack. It was virtually identical to the plan he laid out in his West Point speech. He vowed to drastically increase troop strength, ramp up spending on an array of military related programs such as mobile special forces, pacification teams, intelligence operations, and to beef up military aid to Pakistan. He vowed to take the war to the Taliban in Northwest Pakistan. Eleven months after his Wilson Center speech, Obama was still only the “presumptive” Democratic presidential candidate. Yet, in a CBS Face the Nation interview, he promised to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. These are the exact same words that he used to sell escalation in interviews in the build-up to his West Point speech.

In his pre-presidential speeches, interviews and comments on the war he massaged his war plan. He promised to set a timetable for eventual withdrawal, get out of Iraq, corral Americas European and Middle East allies in a partnership to wipe out the terrorists and their mass destructive weapons, end corruption, hold free elections, bolster Afghan security forces, boost intelligence gathering and monitoring, beef up afghan security forces, and insure a stable government in Afghanistan. This again is virtually identical in every detail to his West Point escalation speech. Two years after he spelled out the plan, the US had shelled out more than $200 billion dollars and suffered nearly 1,000 dead. Not one of these goals has been met.

By then however, Obama had hardened on the military option, and pledged that he’d redeploy troops as fast as he could from Iraq to Afghanistan. Though he tossed out the figure of two brigades as the number of troops he planned to send, he hinted this was not fixed, and the number of troops might go much higher.
Obama has never cited Pentagon pressure as his reason for upping the military ante in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has certainly hammered hard for troop escalation. But the massive troop increase is clearly Obama’s call. A call he made and firmly decided on long before he ever got to the White House.

Some hopeful Afghan war critics blame the Pentagon, GOP war hawks, defense contractors, and oil interests, for arm twisting Obama to escalate. This helps to rationalize their bitter disappointment at the president’s disastrous escalation decision. The truth though is that Afghanistan is the war that Obama always wanted.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.